Re: Hard drive setup...

The message <R5OdnZn-UPWRS9PanZ2dnUVZ8uqdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
from "Marcus Fox" <please-reply-via-newsgroup-th@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
contains these words:

When installing for the first time is it possible to have partitions on one
drive set up as

C:\ - Windows System
D:\ - Optical Drive
E:\ - Applications, Microsoft Office, other programs, etc
F:\ - Documents

And then when the time comes for a re-install, I only need to re-install the
OS and not all of the programs - or is it not that simple?

Additionally I'd like to know if it is possible to move the current boot
partition to another drive and dual boot it with the newly installed OS
until things are set up the way I like and then delete it without a trace,
so the system no longer dual boots?

The idea of partitioning a 'large' hard drive into 2 or 3 disk volumes
is a _very_ good idea. Your layout is spoilt (aesthetically speaking :-)
by having the optical drive assigned (rather arbitarily) the drive
letter D.

It's quite a trivial matter to re-assign another (less arbitary) drive
letter, such as R if it is a READ only device or W if it is a read/WRITE
device ( and start working backwards from Z if you have more than one
such optical drive that has read/write capability) and then move the
hard drive letters above C down to create a contiguous sequence
(provided this is done before installing any apps).

As others have correctly pointed out, if you do a fresh install of the
OS to drive C whilst your programs are installed onto the next hard disk
volume (E in your proposed case, D in my actual case :-), you will need
to re-install pretty well all of those apps (over the top of their
existing location to maximise the chance that any user settings will be
picked up).

However, to get the best out your arrangement, you can avoid the need
to ever have to do a complete re-install from scratch of the OS by the
simple expedient of using partition imaging back up software (I use an
ancient version of PowerQuest's Drive Image Pro v3 for this purpose).

Provided you make (initially at any rate), monthly backups until the
frequency of installing new apps has fallen off, you'll very rarely have
to re-install anything if you find yourself forced to use a restore of
the OS partition from a month (or even months) old partition image.

Of course, you could anticipate the need to make an image backup in the
event the new app has potential to screw things up. Restoring from a
month old backup will most likely need to be brought up to speed
regarding the steady trickle of security and bug fix updates coming from
microsoft. Even restoring from a 6 month old backup is much better than
having to face several years worth of such updates that remain
outstanding from a fresh install (even if it is the SP2 version of winXP
or the SP4 version of win2k).

The main benefits to having the OS corralled in its own 8 or 10GB of
the fastest part of the drive are that the need to defrag all but
disappears (and can be done 'Just for a bit of fun' to while away a
spare 3 or 4 minutes), you can do targetted antivirus scans in a
fraction of the time required to scan a huge single partition and (total
hard disk failure aside) arrange for your priceless user data to be
effectively backed up to a drive that is _NOT_ the OS drive (although
this does not remove the need to backup such data to completely
different storage media).

You'll also find such partitioning will provide a boost in performance
since the OS files are prevented from 'mixing it' with your data and
software files scattered all over the slower portions of the disk.

Regarding your last question, in practice, the short answer is no (the
long answer is no, not really worth all the necessary registry editing
required to make this work :-).

HTH

--
Regards, John.

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